Coexistence without domination

I25

To me winning would be being able to live life without feeling like I owe something….I think it really depends on the situation. I think it's safe to say that if there were no need for prisons, no need for borders, or money, all of these sort of institutionalized methods of control, I think if you got rid of all those and just had the co-existence of people working, living together and not depleting and stripping the ecosystem in which they're placed, to me I guess that would be [winning].

Means and ends

I8

You have to decide before your action, what is my end result? What do I want to achieve? Do I want to engage the masses and try and change them or not? Because if it's not, then hell yeah, do whatever you gotta do. But if you want to play it this way then violence won't play.

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will

I13

"Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will," it's a famous saying by Gramsci. In other words you know rationally that the chances of doing anything radical are very small but you do it anyway. You fight anyway. You cannot have optimism of the will without some idea that it would be possible to have a different world and various institutional things have an impact on people's radical imagination.

Imagination and living otherwise

I5

I think that the imagination is what animates really robust, resilient, dynamic social struggles. So in that way the radical imagination has to speak to how we [are] going to organize ourselves. How are we going to make sure, for instance, while we're busy imagining how our radical action is going to change the world that people with kids or with different abilities are going to be able to be a part of this? How are we going to meet the needs of people on the ground? How are we going to make sure that we have the resources to sustain people? How are we going to make sure that we protect each other from oppression whether internally or externally? And I think imagination has something to say to all those things and for me imagination is that. It's the social imagination of a people’s spirit to resist and live otherwise than they do right now.

Grassroots organizing

I14

I don't think you can be a socialist on your own. You can hold all the theories, you can believe everything that I agree with, but you're not going to be a socialist until you're actually working and also meeting folks in the labour movement, or childcare workers who make $10 an hour, or the crosswalk guards who just got organized, it really just changes your perspective about what the left needs to do to reach the mass of people because way too often I feel we're stuck in universities and academic settings.

Apocalyptic futures

I17

[The future] could go either way. It could be so good or it could be so awful and there seems to be this almost masochistic yearning for an apocalyptic future. Almost self-destructive, you know, it's all bad...it's all going to fall down. People seem to almost anticipate that [but] I don't think they get the implications of it.

Talking strategically

I15

The discussion that's had around diversity of tactics is shallow. I think that we…[talk so much] about tactics that we don't ever talk about strategy and I don't necessarily think that diversity of tactics, writ large, is a strategy in itself….If I say that we accept a diversity of tactics, there [are still] obviously some tactics that [some] people support more than others and I think that we need to do better to define what we mean when we say…‘diversity of tactics’ because we never mean all tactics….[T]here's always people who think that engaging with government is selling out and there's always people who think that breaking windows is violence.

Pulling up oppression by the roots

I29

...removing patriarchy and sexism...would create such a ripple effect that there would be so much more potential. I think that a lot of what goes on that is negative can be traced to those roots.

Building commonality

I1

I [found] myself spending more and more of my time on issues I was seeing [around me]....I saw tenant organizing in a similar way that I see union organizing: it's a way to actually build commonality.

Talking – or not – about patriarchy

I26

A really sad truth...is that when you start talking about patriarchy, people shut down.